WASHINGTON -- About 230 students and faculty at an Alexandria elementary school
are sick with a stomach illness, forcing the school to close on Friday, March 14.
In the past two days, nearly 200 students and more than 30 staff at John Adams
Elementary School called out sick and exhibited symptoms of nausea, vomiting and
diarrhea, school officials say.
Chief Administrative Officer Tammy Ignacio for Alexandria City Public Schools
spoke with members of the news media Friday and says the illness was first
detected in the fourth grade wing of the school.
On Wednesday night, that area of the school was quarantined and cleaned but the
virus still spread to other wings of the school by Thursday, according to Ignacio.
After making the call to close school Friday, she says the facility will be
cleaned "top to bottom" with a substance that consists of 10 percent bleach and
the cleaning process will entail "the walls, the ceilings, the toys, the desks,
pretty much every aspect of the building."
The cleaning will be done in three steps.
"So if you miss anything the first time, you hit it the second and the third," she
says. "We're also looking into a fogging process, which is very safe but it will
kill the virus."
School staff grew concerned Thursday when more than 100 students were absent from
school and Ignacio says that number is "highly unusual." In addition to those out
sick, children and staff were in and out of the nurse's office with vomiting and
diarrhea. By lunch, the school determined this was a situation to get a handle on
and a letter was sent home to parents.
John Adams Elementary consists of 820 students and 131 faculty on staff and is a
pre-Kindergarten through fifth grade program.
The school is closed Friday so the facility and all shared surfaces can be cleaned
and disinfected throughout the weekend. School is scheduled to resume on Monday,
March 17.
The school is working in collaboration with the Alexandria Health Department to
identify cases and prevent the further outbreak of this type of illness which is
highly contagious and spread through contact with an infected person or through
contact with contaminated food or objects. It is also known to thrive on surfaces
such as doorknobs and lockers.
Many viruses and some bacteria can cause stomach illness or gastroenteritis,
according to the Alexandria Health Department. The most likely cause at John Adams
Elementary is a virus called norovirus.
Symptoms usually improve after two days but there is no medicine or treatment to
shorten the illness. However, there are actions parents of students and the
community can take to prevent additional people from catching the bug including:
Make sure a student washes his or her hands frequently and thoroughly with
soap and warm water for 20 seconds.
If a student develops vomiting or diarrhea, keep the child at home for 24
hours after the symptoms stop before sending the student back to school.
Inform school officials if a student is ill with the symptoms.
Watch for signs of dehydration. If an ill child is unable to drink fluids,
call a doctor immediately if there are any concerns.
Ignacio says she is "absolutely" optimistic school will be open on Monday but if
kids develop symptoms over the weekend and it's Monday, she adds, "Please, please
keep them home."
In addition to Friday, students at John Adams have missed nine days of school due
to weather conditions during the 2013-14 school year.
A rare case of suspected HIV
transmission from one woman to another was reported Thursday by US
health authorities (AFP Photo/Manjunath Kiran)
Washington (AFP) - A rare case of suspected HIV transmission
from one woman to another was reported Thursday by US health
authorities.
The 46-year-old
woman "likely acquired" human immunodeficiency virus while in a
monogamous relationship with an HIV-positive female partner in Texas,
said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The
woman, whose name was not released, had engaged in heterosexual
relationships in the past, but not in the 10 years prior to her HIV
infection.
Her HIV-positive
partner, a 43-year-old woman who first tested positive in 2008, was her
only sexual partner in the six months leading up to the test that came
back positive for HIV.
She
did not report any other risk factors for acquiring the virus that
causes AIDS, such as injection drug use, organ transplant, tattoos,
acupuncture or unprotected sex with multiple partners.
The
strain of HIV with which she was infected was a 98 percent genetic
match to her partner's, said the CDC in its weekly report.
Authorities first learned of the case in August 2012 from the Houston Department of Health.
The
couple said they had not received any counseling about safe sex
practices, and reported that they routinely had sex without barrier
methods.
"They described their sexual contact as at times rough to the point of inducing bleeding in either woman," said the CDC report.
"They also reported having unprotected sexual contact during the menses of either partner."
The
partner who was infected since 2008 had been prescribed antiretroviral
drugs in 2009 but stopped taking them in November 2010, and was lost to
follow up in January 2011.
The
CDC warned that although such cases are rare, "female-to-female
transmission is possible because HIV can be found in vaginal fluid and
menstrual blood."
People with
HIV should be under the care of a doctor and take their prescribed
medicines to keep their viral load down and reduce the risk of infecting
a partner, the CDC said.
Very
few cases of this kind have been documented, and confirmation "has been
difficult because other risk factors almost always are present or
cannot be ruled out," said the report.
One survey of 960,000 female blood donors found 144 who tested positive for HIV and were therefore blocked from donating.
Of 106 of those women who agreed to interviews, none described female-to-female sexual contact as their only risk factor.
The
CDC also described one case of a woman in the Philippines who tested
positive for HIV and said she had sex only with women and did not inject
drugs, though no source of infection could be confirmed.
One
other case is known of a 20-year-old woman who was diagnosed with HIV
after a two-year monogamous relationship with a female partner who was
HIV positive. While both women had the same drug-resistant HIV
mutations, no tests were done to identify if their HIV strains were a
genetic match.
Washington (AFP) - A
pint-sized tyrannosaur braved the frigid Arctic and feasted on fellow
dinosaurs 70 million years ago, according to a report Wednesday on a new
species identified from fossilized skull bones in Alaska.
Scientists have
crowned the fierce creature the "polar bear lizard," or Nanuqsaurus
hoglundi, and they say it stood as tall as a modern man but was half the
size of its very close cousin, T. rex, the "lizard king."
An
analysis of several skull bones and teeth are described in the journal
PLoS ONE by Anthony Fiorillo and Ronald Tykoski of the Perot Museum of
Nature and Science in Texas.
Roving across land that was dark for
half the year and prone to rainy, snowy and frigid spells, the miniature
tyrannosaur likely had a strong sense of smell and may also have had
sharp vision to hunt prey at night.
It was also just as big as another common meat-eating dinosaur found in Alaska, the Troodon, Fiorillo told AFP.
"To
us that is a really cool thing because it is telling us, we think, that
there is something about the Arctic environment of 70 million years ago
that selected for an optimal body size for a successful predator."
Fact file on a new genus of Tyrannosaur found in Alaska (130 x 95 mm) (AFP Photo/K. Tian, J.Jacobsen …
- Skull fragments tell a story -
The bones were found on a bluff above the Colville River in northern Alaska.
Remains
of the much larger T. rex have typically been found further south,
scattered across the western United States where the climate would have
been warmer.
The area inside
the Arctic Circle where the dinosaur bones were found was not as cold 70
million years ago, and was probably on par with modern day Seattle,
Washington, or Calgary, Canada.
The
tyrannosaur's skull fragments were found in a hole along with a horned
dinosaur it likely killed and tried to eat, based on the tooth-size
gashes in the plant-eater's bones, researchers said.
At the time of publication,
researchers had four bone pieces, some of which were crucial because
they showed the head growth of an adult, rather than a juvenile, and
allowed scientists to estimate the overall skull size.
Since then, more fragments have been unearthed, Fiorillo said.
"We
have a pretty complete picture of the skull roof now. The beauty of
that is that the sediment that filled it in preserves the shape of the
brain and we can see that this animal also had a well developed sense of
smell."
University of Chicago
paleontologist Paul Sereno, who was not involved in the research,
described the jaw and skull fragments as "pretty exciting."
When fossils of dinosaurs were first found in the Arctic three decades ago, they were initially mistaken for whale bones.
Early
on, some experts believed the dinosaurs may have migrated, or that
juveniles would have been unable to survive there, but more recent
discoveries have debunked those ideas.
"We
couldn't get ourselves to believe that they lived up there in the
darkness," Sereno told AFP, adding that recent discoveries have changed
that way of thinking.
"They must have been managing somehow. We know that reindeer change their diet to eat all sorts of strange things."
The
new species' name, Nanuqsaurus hoglundi, is a nod to the Inuit name for
polar bear, Nanook, and the natural gas tycoon Forrest Hoglund who
helped fund the Texas museum where Arctic dinosaur bones are displayed
(Reuters)
- Cases of the deadly Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea virus, a highly
contagious pig disease, are increasing across the U.S. farm belt, a
group of animal health researchers said.
Confirmed cases of PEDv increased by 252 in the week ending March 1,
bringing the total number to 4,106 in 26 states, according to data
released on Thursday by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's National
Animal Health Laboratory Network.
While one case can represent an individual animal or an entire herd at a
single site, swine specialists estimate PEDv has killed at least 4
million U.S. hogs since it was discovered in May 2013.
Pork processors were finding it more difficult to purchase hogs for
slaughter due to the virus, which is starting to affect the pork supply
and could eventually boost pork prices for consumers, industry sources
said.
The Canadian Swine
Health Board has confirmed that four provinces also have cases of the
virus. The provinces are Manitoba, Ontario, Prince Edward Island and
Quebec.
PEDv causes diarrhea,
vomiting and severe dehydration in pigs. While older pigs have a chance
of survival, 80 to 100 percent of piglets that contract it die.
The virus does not affect humans and is not a food safety risk.
(Reporting by Meredith Davis in Chicago; editing by Matthew Lewis)
There was exciting news this week in the battle against HIV/AIDS, much of it coming out of the annual Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI),
which took place in Boston. But perhaps the biggest story was that, for
the second time in history, a baby born with HIV has been declared free
of the virus after early, aggressive treatment.
While “baby
cured of HIV” is, for sure, a thrilling headline, scientists are more
cautiously hopeful than some media outlets would suggest. “That case is
definitely intriguing,” Reilly O’Neal, editor of the San Francisco AIDS Foundation’s blog BETA,
who attended the conference, tells Yahoo Shine. “The baby was tested
with incredibly sensitive tests. The case supports the idea that very
early treatment has the potential to dramatically reduce HIV reservoirs [the genetic code of the virus that 'hides' in the body], which are a major obstacle in curing HIV.”
The
now-famous "second baby" was treated in Los Angeles after being born
last year to an HIV-positive mother who had received no prenatal care.
(Treating pregnant mothers reduces the transmission of the virus to
their babies.) Only four hours after the baby was born, doctors began
administering an antiretroviral cocktail, the same one that had
successfully led to remission in an HIV-infected newborn in Mississippi
three years ago. Now, nine months later, there is no detectable trace of
the virus in the second baby’s cells and she continues to undergo
treatment.
So
does that mean we've now found a cure for HIV? Well, not yet. On
Wednesday, one of the baby's physicians, Yvonne Bryson, an infectious
disease specialist at Mattel Children's Hospital UCLA, told the audience
at CROI, "We don't know if the baby is in remission, but it looks like
that." According to O’Neal, Dr. Deborah Persaud of Johns Hopkins
University, who tested the baby and also spoke at CROI, was careful not to refer to the infant as “cured.”
Dr. Anthony Fauci,
director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases
(NIAID), explains to Yahoo Shine, “The only real proof is if you stop
therapy and the virus doesn’t bounce back.”
That search for
proof, of course, begs the question: When is it ethical to withdraw
treatment to test for remission? Five months after the mother of the
Mississippi baby ceased giving the girl her medications at 18 months
old, her doctors were shocked when a blood test revealed that she was
still HIV-free. Fauci says that both of these cases suggest the promise
of early intervention in the prevention of HIV transmission to newborns.
(Right now, about 200 babies are born with HIV in the United States
annually.) In April, NIAID will be funding a series of trials in which
babies will be treated for the virus and carefully withdrawn from
treatment under highly controlled conditions.
And there's more good news: A limited but hopeful pilot study presented at CROI and published in the New England Journal of Medicine
on Wednesday focused on gene editing — the process of removing genetic
material from a person, altering it to make cells become HIV-resistant,
and replacing it in the body. Genetic modification has the potential to
both prevent and reverse HIV. The goal of the study was to test the safety of the technique.
A
small percentage of people are actually resistant to HIV because their
immune cells lack CCR5, a protein that acts as a gateway to the virus.
In 2008, a man named Timothy Brown, known as the “Berlin Patient,”
was cleared of HIV after receiving a bone marrow transplant for
leukemia from a donor who happened to have the CCR5 mutation. In the
current study, which built on that case, researchers removed blood from
12 HIV-positive men to disable CCR5 in their immune cells. The cells
were returned to their bloodstreams through a transfusion. Researchers
found that the modified cells did increase in vivo, and when patients
went off their medication as part of the study, the modified immune
cells remained more resistant to HIV than regular cells. “It was an
important conceptual advance, but not the end of the game,” says Fauci.
Rowena Johnston, PhD, the vice president and director of research at amfAR,
says she’s optimistic about the future of gene therapy. “Some people
think it's pie in the sky, especially for poorer countries with fewer
resources,” she tells Yahoo Shine. “But if you had a potential to cure
34 million people, someone’s going to figure out a way to do it.”
Another
compelling line of research that was published this week involved two
related studies that looked at the efficacy of long-term antiviral
injections in monkeys. In one study, by the CDC,
six monkeys were given a monthly injection of an experimental
antiretroviral drug, and six were given a placebo. All were exposed to
HIV twice a week. After four exposures, the six monkeys on a placebo
tested HIV-positive, but after 20 weeks, the other six remained
virus-free. The second study, by the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center at Rockefeller University, had similar results. Previous research has shown that taking a daily antiretroviral pill has a strong protective effect,
but some researchers believe that a monthly or quarterly injection
might be more practical and an easier regimen for some people to stick
with.
And finally, one more intriguing study presented at CROI was the PARTNER study.
“Some of the most exciting news this week comes from this study,”
O’Neal says. Researchers analyzed data from more than 750 mixed
HIV-status couples who were having sex without condoms. It found that no
cases of HIV transmission took place when the positive partner was
adhering to effective antiretroviral therapy. “The real-world
implications are huge,” she shares. “Researchers could not rule out that
HIV infections might happen over the long term … but people in
mixed-HIV status couples can use these data to make their own informed
decisions.” The final results of the PARTNER study will be published in 2017.
While
we may still be years away from a cure for HIV, from treatment to
prevention, we’ve come a long way from the dark days when a diagnosis
was a death sentence. And that's good news now.
Fish outside CW Seafood and
Meat Market in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. Health officials said gloves
should be worn in the handling of raw seafood.Credit
Brian Harkin for The New York Times
At
least 30 people have contracted a rare skin infection after buying
seafood at markets in Chinese neighborhoods across New York City,
prompting health officials to issue a warning to consumers and market
workers to take precautions when handling raw or live fish.
The
source of the outbreak was unclear, but health officials said that all
of the people who were infected had bought fish at markets in Sunset
Park, Brooklyn; Flushing, Queens; or Chinatown, in Manhattan.
There was no evidence that eating fish from any of those markets could cause illness, officials said.
“People
are encouraged to wear waterproof gloves in their home when preparing
live or raw fish or seafood that came from a market in Chinatown,
especially if they have cuts or abrasions,” the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene said in a statement.
Dr.
Jay Varma, the deputy commissioner for disease control, said the
bacterium that causes the infection, Mycobacterium marinum, is common in
fish and aquariums but rarely causes infections in humans.
“If
you were to ask 100 doctors if they had seen a case, you would be lucky
to find one who had,” he said. “For us to see 30 cases clustered like
this is very unusual.”
The
investigation into the source or sources of the outbreak is
complicated, in part because the infections tend to take weeks to show
symptoms.
In
a typical case, Dr. Varma said, the first signs of infection are bumps
under the skin or tender lesions. From there, it worsens into a wound
that will not heal.
The
infection can spread to the soft tissue below the skin and then into
tendons and muscles. It is treatable with a targeted combination of
antibiotics. But if the infection goes untreated for a prolonged period,
it can require surgery to repair damage to nerves, tendons and muscles.
Dr. Danny Fong, a hand surgeon who works in Manhattan’s Chinatown and is the president of the Chinese American Medical Society,
said he saw perhaps one case a year. The source of the infection has
been varied, he said. For instance, he had one patient who worked on
boats and most likely got infected after scrubbing barnacles off a
ship’s hull.
Dr. Fong was not alarmed when he saw an infected patient in August.
But then in September he saw another. Then another. Then another.
By February, at least 15 people had shown up at his office with the type of lesions that are the hallmark of the condition.
He alerted the health department a little over a week ago. Since then, the department has identified an additional 15 cases.
“We anticipate we will definitely learn about more,” Dr. Varma said.
Dr.
Fong said that doctors in the community have been warned to be on the
lookout for the infection, and that he could only guess as to the cause
of the outbreak. Most of his patients, he said, were infected after skin
punctures from fish bones. But one patient fell ill after cutting
himself on a lobster.
While
all of the patients were infected after handling live or raw seafood,
health officials could not rule out other possible sources of the
infections, such as the water in the fish tanks.
So
far, no fish markets have been closed; Dr. Varma said he suspected
there were multiple problematic locations. “We don’t think it is one
market,” he said, “but it could be.”
The
investigation was in its early stages. City, state and federal
officials were examining how seafood tanks at the markets are cleaned,
and if practices have changed recently. They were also looking at the
origin of the fish sold at these markets and whether any new species
were being sold.
The
warnings did little to slow the activity at fish markets across the
city on Wednesday, with many shoppers unaware of the warnings.
In
some neighborhoods, the haggling and trading takes place on the
sidewalk. At the Asian fish markets in Flushing, the activity takes
place inside, but is no less frenzied.
Handwritten cardboard signs in Chinese stick out of the ice identifying the day’s catch: yellow croakers, sea bass, razor clams.
Fish
sellers in a handful of shops in Brooklyn and Queens wore gloves or
used clear plastic bags when handling raw or live fish. “Everybody knows
if you don’t use gloves it’s very dangerous, even when you clean the
fish,” said Nicky Chen, the manager of S&P Seafood on Eighth Avenue.
He wore thick rubber gloves as he sold fish, clams, crabs and lobsters.
Many customers, however, seemed comfortable touching the fish barehanded.
Washington (AFP) - A new dinosaur species discovered in
Portugal dominated the food chain 150 million years ago -- the
Tyrannosaurus Rex of its time, researchers said Wednesday.
The new species is the largest land predator
discovered in Europe and one of the largest worldwide of the Jurassic
era, said authors Christophe Hendrickx and Octavio Mateus of the
Universidade Nova de Lisboa and Museu da Lourinha.
The Torvosaurus
gurneyi, like T. Rex, was a bipedal carnivore with blade-like teeth
more than 4 inches (10 centimeters) in length, they said in a report
published in the US journal PLOS ONE.
"This
was clearly a fierce predator," Mateus told AFP. "Wherever he arrived,
he was the owner and master. No one could rival Torvosaurus during the
late Jurassic. This is the equivalent of T. rex but 80 million years
before."
The scientists
estimate Torvosaurus gurneyi grew up to 33 feet (10 meters) long and
weighed some 4 or 5 tons. Its skull measured nearly four-feet (115
centimeters) long, smaller than the T. Rex, but not by a huge margin.
The
fossils found in Portugal closely resemble those of a North American
dinosaur -- the Torvosaurus tanneri -- and indeed at first the
scientists thought the two specimens must be from the same species.
Geologist Bill Simpson cleans Sue, a 67-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus Rex on display at the Field M …
But upon closer analysis of
the bones, the researchers determined the species must have evolved
separately from the two sides of the proto-Atlantic Ocean over a few
million years.
Mateus said it's
hard to know how different the two species would have looked when they
were living -- there may have been differences in coloring or behavior
that would have easily distinguished them.
From the fossil record, the differences are more subtle.
The
North American species has 11 or more teeth on its upper jaw, compared
to fewer than 11 for the Portuguese dinosaur, the researchers explained.
And the mouth bones are shaped and structured differently.
- A 'game-changing' predator -
Discovering
such a large predator in this era could really be "a game changer" in
terms of how scientists think of the Jurassic food chain, explained
University of Kansas paleontologist David Burnham, who was not involved
in the research.
"These things
were living with giant plant-eating dinosaurs," or sauropods, Burnham
explained, herbivores too big for other common Jurassic predators, like
the Allosaurus, to attack.
But
if the estimates of the new Torvosaurus are right, he said, the
carnivore was certainly big and fast enough to catch a small sauropod.
"The blade-like teeth of Torvosaurus are particularly nasty since they would seem to indicate a slash-shred strategy," he added.
The
new species is also of interest to paleontologists, because it gives a
more detailed picture of the interactions and connections between North
America and Europe at the time.
"Finding
another (Torvosaurus) species in Portugal is pretty cool, because this
is additional evidence that shows a similarity in Jurassic dinosaurs in
Europe and in North America," adding to finds of a Stegosaurus and an
Allosaurus in both the US West and Portugal, said Ken Carpenter,
paleontologist at Utah State University.
The
idea of genetically altering people’s cells to make them resist the
virus that causes AIDS may seem like a pipe dream, but a new report
suggests it can be done.
The research involves the first use in humans of “gene editing,” a treatment that zeros in on a particular gene and disables it.
In
12 people infected with H.I.V., scientists used the technique to get
rid of a protein on the patients’ immune cells that the virus must latch
onto to invade the cells. Cells were removed from the patients, treated
and then dripped back into their bloodstreams through an intravenous
line.
In
theory, if enough cells could be engineered to repel the virus,
patients might no longer need antiviral drugs, and might in effect be
cured.
The
experiment was a pilot study, meant to test safety, not efficacy. It
found that immune cells could be altered, and that doing so did not harm
patients. The gene editing also seemed to help fight the infection in
some cases, but the findings are preliminary and researchers cautioned
that widespread use of the technique is a long way off.
“It’s
a great strategy,” said Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National
Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who was not involved in
the research. “It’s exciting, interesting, elegant science. But a lot of
‘ifs’ need to be addressed before you can say ‘Wow, this could really
work.’ ”
Dr.
Fauci also questioned whether patients would want this relatively
complex treatment when many people can keep the infection under control
with just one to a few pills a day.
An article about the study is being published on Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine,
by researchers from the University of Pennsylvania, the Albert Einstein
College of Medicine in New York and Sangamo BioSciences, a company in
Richmond, Calif., that makes the gene-editing product.
The
study has its roots in something that scientists discovered in the
1990s: A small percentage of people are resistant to H.I.V. thanks to a
lucky mutation that causes their immune cells to lack CCR5, a protein
that gives the virus a foothold. In people with one copy of the mutated
gene, the infection progresses more slowly than in those who have normal
CCR5. People who have inherited two copies of the mutated gene, one
from each parent, are highly resistant to H.I.V. and may never become
infected despite repeated exposure.
One
man, known as “the Berlin patient,” was apparently cured of AIDS after
he developed leukemia and had bone-marrow transplants in 2007 and 2008.
As luck would have it, his bone-marrow donor had two copies of the
mutated gene for CCR5. His immune system rebounded, the virus
disappeared and he was able to stop taking antiviral drugs. But
bone-marrow transplants are too arduous, risky and expensive to be used
as a treatment for H.I.V.
Dr.
Carl June, the senior author of the study and an expert in AIDS and
cancer at the University of Pennsylvania, said gene editing may offer
another way to achieve the same result.
He
said the approach was worth considering because many patients dislike
the antiviral drugs and experience side effects, and because lifelong
treatment can cost $1 million in the United States. Gene editing could
be cheaper, he said.
One
scientific advance had a big role in making researchers consider even
trying to engineer H.I.V. resistance: the development of a powerful
molecular tool, zinc-finger nucleases,
enzymes that can cut DNA at specific sites. When the cell tries to
repair such a cut, it often makes mistakes, disabling that particular
gene.
At
first, he doubted that the technology would ever be useful for humans,
but he began trying it out in mice, and was surprised by how well it
worked.
“It’s incredible,” Dr. June said. “This tool can target any gene you desire.”
He and his team began testing the technique
in people with H.I.V. in 2009. The 12 patients were given infusions of
about 10 billion of their own CD4 T-cells, which had been treated to
disable the CCR5 gene. The technique disabled the gene in 11 percent to
28 percent of the treated cells.
Six
of the patients then stopped taking antiviral drugs. In most, their
H.I.V. levels went up and their immune cells diminished. But the
modified immune cells declined significantly less than the patients’
untreated cells, suggesting that the gene editing was protective. The
altered cells persisted, at least for a while. On average, half were
still present after 48 weeks.
Jay
Johnson, 53, who lives in Philadelphia, took part in the study and was
treated in 2010. He was the only patient who had an adverse reaction: a
brief bout with fever, chills and joint and back pain.
For
three months, he went off antiviral drugs. Initially, his virus levels
were undetectable, but they began to rise, and he went back on the
drugs.
A
few months ago, doctors told him that he still had some of the altered
cells, Mr. Johnson said, adding that he hopes the cells will keep
multiplying, take over and eventually leave him virus free. He would
gladly go through the treatment again, he said.
“If this works, it will be just such an overwhelming joy to say that I’m H.I.V. negative,” he said.
As
the studies move ahead, Dr. June said, researchers will be trying to
find ways to increase the proportion of edited cells and to make them
persist in the body. It remains to be seen whether the treatment can be
made practical for large numbers of patients. Because the test patients
have received a treatment that alters their DNA, the Food and Drug
Administration requires 15 years of follow-up to check for adverse
effects. One concern is that the treatment could disable the wrong
genes, though no evidence of that has been seen so far.
A version of this article appears in print on March 6, 2014, on page A4 of the New York edition with the headline: Study Gives Hope of Altering Genes to Repel H.I.V.
Washington (AFP) - A baby treated for HIV within hours of
birth is free of the virus nearly a year later, in the second case that
has raised hopes about early treatment, doctors said.
The approach mirrored that taken for a Mississippi
baby, who has been off treatment for 21 months and still has no
detectable virus in her system.
The latest research on the two
young girls was presented at the annual Conference on Retroviruses and
Opportunistic Infections (CROI) in Boston.
The newest case
involves a Los Angeles baby who was born to a mother infected with HIV
and who had not been taking her medications, making her at high risk for
transmission, said Yvonne Bryson, chief of pediatric infectious
diseases at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of
California, Los Angeles.
Audra Deveikis, a pediatric infectious
disease specialist at Miller Children's Hospital Long Beach, where the
baby was born, tested the infant and gave her high, treatment-level
doses of antiretroviral drugs before even knowing if she was
HIV-positive, Bryson told AFP by phone from the conference.
"The
way it works is you test and you treat before you know the results
because it takes several days to get the results," explained Bryson, a
consultant on the case.
A baby treated for HIV within hours of birth is free of the virus nearly a year later, in the second …
Treatment started at four hours of age, even earlier than the Mississippi child.
Eventually, the tests came back positive for HIV.
But by six days of age, the virus was undetectable.
"The remarkable thing about this particular baby is that the virus disappeared so quickly," said Bryson.
- Not a 'cure' yet -
The baby is still being treated with antiretroviral drugs, and
researchers are cautious not to utter the world "cure" or even
"remission" just yet.
Now aged 11 months, the child is doing well and continues to see doctors while under the care of a foster family.
She has "no detectable viral load, nothing since six days of age. That is the earliest ever," said Bryson.
Once she turns two, doctors may decide to stop suppressive therapy to see if she is in remission, or if the virus would rebound.
"The only way we would know if the baby is in remission is to stop therapy," explained Bryson.
Also
at the conference, Deborah Persaud of Johns Hopkins University
presented the latest on the Mississippi baby, who was given ART at 31
hours of age.
Now, the
three-year-old is considered in remission from HIV, after drug treatment
was stopped 21 months ago and no viral rebound has been observed.
Bryson said the Los Angeles team is optimistic that their baby will do just as well.
"The
fact that it was a very fast reduction in the virus to undetectable
levels makes us very hopeful that this baby might follow in the
footsteps of the Mississippi which is still being followed," said
Bryson.
"We are learning a lot now and it is exciting for the future."
There
is no known cure for AIDS, which has infected some 70 million people
around the world and killed 35 million, according to the World Health
Organization.
The
expression, “there must be something in the water,” couldn’t be more
appropriate in describing what happens when harmful bacteria taints the
food or water we consume.
The expression, “there
must be something in the water,” couldn’t be more appropriate in
describing what happens when harmful bacteria taints the food or water
we consume. Whether from a simple stomach bug or a serious case of
salmonella, millions around the world suffer from illnesses, often
life-threatening, that are caused by something they ate or drank.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates
that roughly 48 million people — without accounting for the millions of
unreported cases — in the United States alone are infected each year
with foodborne illnesses. Millions more suffer in countries all over the world, often times facing hospitalization, permanent symptoms, and even death.
In Haiti, residents are currently suffering from the worst choleraoutbreak
in history. Originating from contamination of the country’s main water
source, the deadly disease has so far infected more than 600,000 people
and has killed more than 8,000.
In 2006, 152 people who attended a local village Buddhist festival in Thailand were infected with botulism
after eating locally-made bamboo shoots at the festival. One hundred of
the people infected were hospitalized and 40 required respirators to
breathe.
Thirty-three years ago in Spain, 25,000 people fell severely ill, some permanently disabled, and 1,000 died in an outbreak
caused by the consumption of poisoned cooking oil. Doctors called the
disease “atypical pneumonia,” which presented flu-like symptoms,
including fever, vomiting, nausea, and breathing difficulties as well as
fluid buildup in the lungs, skin rashes, and muscle pain.
An E. colioutbreak
in Germany in 2011 was the country’s biggest foodborne bacterial
outbreak for six centuries. The disease caused more than 3,100 cases of
diarrhea, more than 850 cases of hemolytic uremic syndrome
(HUS) — a condition that can lead to kidney failure — and 53 deaths.
These are just a few examples of how foodborne diseases can originate
from a single food or drink source and spread to thousands, even
millions, of people in a short time, leaving a detrimental impact on a
society.[slideshow:873571]
Cholera, botulism, and E. coli, along with many others, are some of the most commonly occurring
foodborne illnesses, typically originating from contaminated water, raw
foods of animal origin, fruits and vegetables contaminated with animal
waste or unclean water, raw sprouts, unpasteurized fruit juices and
cider, or foods that have come into contact with someone who is sick.
Life-threatening diseases like
these may not be easy to avoid in most cases, but knowing how and where
they can occur could possibly save one or thousands of lives. Read on
for more foodborne illnesses that have occurred around the world.
Haley WIllard is The Daily Meal's assistant editor. Follow her on Twitter @haleywillrd.
Two separate HIV studies on macaque monkeys show very promising results.
Researchers from Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center at Rockefeller
University in New York presented their findings on Tuesday at
the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in Boston,
Mass.
They determined that a newly designed shot routinely taken four times a year could possibly protect people from the HIV virus.
One San Francisco doctor from Gladstone Institute, which is
affiliated with the University of California, told the Associated Press
that two studies were “showing 100 percent protection” from the virus.
“This is the most exciting innovation in the field of HIV prevention that I’ve heard recently,” said Dr. Robert Grant.
“If it works and proves to be safe, it would allow for HIV to be
prevented with periodic injections, perhaps every three months.”
The GSK1265744 drug was the experimental medicine used in the latest
research study. The drug company GlaxoSmithKline makes the potent drug.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was the first to test the effectiveness of the new drug.
Two recent studies by the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center provided further validation.
In the first study, 16 monkeys were exposed to the virus once a week
for eight weeks. Eight of the monkeys were given two treatments within
that time frame, whereas the remaining was given a placebo shot. In a
second study, six out of 12 monkeys were given the shot.
The end results for both experiments determined that those given
GSK1265744 injections were protected from the virus for at least 5 to 10
weeks. Watch The Doctors cover a segment on monkeys used as a cure for HIV virus:
Truvada, a HIV preventive pill already available to the public, may
soon be replaced. Experts say that injections may prove to be a better
option for people who are reluctant to taking pills.
According to Bloomberg:
“If successful, the injection may provide an alternative to Gilead
Sciences Inc. (GILD)’s Truvada pill, which won U.S. approval in 2012 to
lower the chance of infection for people who don’t have the virus but
are at risk of catching it.”
Researchers from the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center have
established that the next steps involve testing the shot on humans as a
treatment first, and then as a preventive medication. Image via Wikimedia Commons
Researchers revived a virus
dormant in a 30,000-year-old ice core. They warn that oil and gas
development in far northern latitudes, such as the one shown here, near
Salym, Russia, could disturb microbes harmful to humans.
(Andrey Rudakov / Bloomberg)
By Geoffrey Mohan
March 3, 2014, 12:20 p.m.
A 30,000-year-old giant virus has been revived from the frozen Siberian tundra, sparking concern that increased mining and oil drilling in rapidly warming northern latitudes could disturb dormant microbial life that could one day prove harmful to man.
The latest find, described online Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
appears to belong to a new family of mega-viruses that infect only
amoeba. But its revival in a laboratory stands as “a proof of principle
that we could eventually resurrect active infectious viruses from
different periods,” said the study’s lead author, microbiologist
Jean-Michel Claverie of Aix-Marseille University in France.
“We know that those non-dangerous viruses are alive there, which
probably is telling us that the dangerous kind that may infect humans
and animals -- that we think were eradicated from the surface of Earth
-- are actually still present and eventually viable, in the ground,”
Claverie said.
With climate change making
northern reaches more accessible, the chance of disturbing dormant human
pathogens increases, the researchers concluded. Average surface
temperatures in the area that contained the virus have increased more
steeply than in more temperate latitudes, the researchers noted.
“People will go there; they will settle there, and they will start
mining and drilling,” Claverie said. “Human activities are going to
perturb layers that have been dormant for 3 million years and may
contain viruses.”
Claverie’s co-author, Chantal Abergel, nonetheless cautioned that
their finding is limited to one innocuous virus infecting an amoeba.“We
cannot definitely say that there are some human pathogens in there,” she
said.
They will reexamine the drill core samples, Abergel said, to “find
out if there is anything there that is dangerous to humans and animals.”
Claverie’s laboratory was behind the discovery, in Chile, more than a decade ago, of the first giant DNA virus, dubbed Mimivirus. They next identified a far larger virus of an entirely different family in 2011, dubbing it Pandoravirus salinus, in homage to the mythical Pandora’s box that first unleashed evil on the world.
This time, they used an amoeba commonly found in soil and water as
bait to draw out a virus from a Siberian permafrost core that had been
dated to 30,000 years ago.
The finding described Monday looked like another Pandora, except it was 50% larger.
"Giant" in virology is still pretty tiny. A virus of one micron
in size, or a thousandth of a millimeter, is considered huge. That's
big enough to be seen with a normal light microscope. The human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV, measures one tenth of a micron.
The genome of the newly described virus, however, contained only
about a quarter of the number of paired DNA building blocks as Pandora,
and the prevailing type of these base pairs was similar to the kind that
dominate the Mimivirus genome.
Researchers kept with the ominous mythological theme and dubbed their find Pithovirus, from the Greek pithos, the type of amphora, or jar, that Pandora opened (it was not a box, after all).
Pithovirus still has an unusually large genome -- 600,000 base pairs,
which the researchers predict would include genes that code 467
proteins. The genome of Pandora virus contains more than 2.8 million
base pairs and about 2,500 coding genes. For comparison: the tiny HIV retrovirus
has 9,749 base pairs and nine coding genes; the virus that causes
mononucleosis has about 172,000 base pairs and about 80 genes.
The prospect of finding additional viruses that prove to be viable in
a host remains uncertain. Microbiologist Brent C. Christner, of Louisiana State University,
who has done similar work on frozen microbes but was not involved in
the study, cautioned that DNA is easily damaged and that viruses cannot
replicate or mutate without a host. “They have no source of energy,” he
said. “They have to hijack the mechanisms of the host cell.”
Nonetheless, the study further challenges the notion that viruses can
be fully eradicated, Christner said. The genome described in the study,
he noted, encodes 125 proteins involved in transcription, DNA repair
and replication.
The researchers plan to reexamine large viruses that have been
mistaken for bacteria in the past -- one such specimen, found in 2008,
had infected an amoeba living in a 17-year-old woman’s contact lens
solution.
They also plan to look more deeply into the Siberian ice cores. "We
have a sample that dates to 3 million years old,” Abergel said.
Those samples could harbor ancient forms of relatively modern human pathogens, including smallpox,
which was rampant in Siberia. Fragments of a smallpox virus, for
example, have been identified in Siberian mummies dating from the late
17th century.
“I would not be surprised that those viruses are still in the ground,” Claverie said.
On January 31st, billions
around the world rang in the Chinese Lunar New Year. Hualan Chen, a
scientist with the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Science, however,
celebrated from her office. Like so many days before, Chen got to work
and immediately checked the number of new cases of H7N9 flu
that had been recorded overnight. After a small outbreak in 2013 the
virus had gone quiet, only to resurge with a vengeance in December.
The situation is changing so
rapidly that Chen can hardly keep up. "I think this virus is a bigger
problem than people realize. There is a high chance of a pandemic if it
continues to spread because no one has immunity to this virus," she told
attendees at a recent conference. "If there is sustained human-to-human
transmission, it won't just be a problem for China, it will be a
disaster for the world."
"It will be a disaster for the world."
Indeed, health officials worry
that the H7N9 cases in China are the beginnings of yet another pandemic —
one for which we're woefully unprepared. Although the public health
community has been readying
for The Next Big One, recent history shows that even smaller pandemics
can cause serious problems. In 2009, for instance, the H1N1 pandemic
popped up seemingly out of nowhere and showed that our ability to
rapidly distribute vaccine and antiviral medication wasn't nearly
effective enough.
"Even just this little
pipsqueak of an epidemic showed that we couldn't get vaccines to the
people who needed it in time, even in the US — the country with one of
the most advanced health systems in the world," says David Fedson, a
retired infectious disease and vaccine expert from the University of
Virginia. "The vaccine prevented maybe 2 to 4 percent of swine flu
deaths."
The 2009 epidemic and stirrings
of a potential H7N9 epidemic have mobilized Fedson and other public
health experts to look for new ways to decrease the effects of seasonal
and pandemic flu. And according to Fedson, one surprising group of
drugs, called statins, might serve just that purpose. Typically used to
reduce cholesterol, they might also turn down the body's immune response
to the virus responsible for many flu-related hospitalizations and
deaths.
Statins are cheap, safe, and widely available
Statins are cheap, safe, and
widely available even in developing countries, which gives them a huge
advantage over traditional vaccines and antivirals. Preliminary studies
have hinted that people who take statins are less likely to die from
influenza complications. But not everyone is convinced. Other scientists
have pointed out flaws in the studies and say sufficient data doesn't
yet exist.
Fedson, though, thinks we can't
afford to wait. "Desperate circumstances will call for desperate
measures," he says. "If there is a pandemic and people are sick, doctors
will want to use anything they can get their hands on, and statins are
everywhere."
Not just for the birds
For thousands of years, humans
have been battling influenza. Every winter, as temperatures drop and
humidity declines, flu season starts like clockwork. Normal cases of
seasonal influenza in the US are serious enough, causing 200,000
hospitalizations and anywhere from 3,000 to 49,000 deaths each year.
Every decade or two, however, a
new strain pops up among the slew of viruses in birds and pigs. Our
bodies respond most strongly to two proteins on the outside of the
influenza virus: hemaglutinin (H) and neuraminidase (N). Flu viruses
have countless varieties of Hs and Ns that mix together in birds and
pigs in a process known as reassortment, which allows different Hs to
match with different Ns. The result is a brand-new flu named after its
specific combination of Hs and Ns such as H5N1 or H7N9.
The flu shot is far from perfect
The predominant mode of
preventing infection is the flu shot, but it's far from perfect. It
takes around six months to manufacture the vaccine, which means
scientists have to take an educated guess in the spring about which
strains are going to be circulating in the fall. It also means flu shots
need to be repeated on a yearly basis. And antiviral medications aren't
much better. To be effective they need to be taken within 48 hours of
the first flu symptoms, and they're only available by prescription.
They're also relatively pricey: around $120 for a 10-day course. It
might not sound like much to people in the US, but the cost is out of
reach for many in resource-poor countries.
Dialing down the immune system
Both the vaccine and antiviral agents focus their efforts on the flu itself.
"What makes you feel so sick
isn't the virus itself, but your immune system's attempts to kill the
flu virus," says Jeff Kwong, a public health physician at the University
of Toronto.
Since it's not the virus
itself that's directly responsible for so many hospitalizations and
deaths, Fedson began to contemplate drugs that could turn down the
body's immune reaction just enough to keep it from causing
life-threatening symptoms. Existing studies have shown that statins save
lives not by decreasing cholesterol, but by decreasing the inflammation
caused by low-density lipoproteins (LDLs, or "bad" cholesterol). Since
inflammation is part of the immune response, Fedson believed that
statins might also help turn down that reaction in people with
influenza. Despite repeatedly making his case to the World Health
Organization (WHO) and other health authorities, no one seemed
interested. "Flu scientists are so focused on the virus that they don't
see anything else that might be going on," Fedson says.
On the surface, it seemed a victory for statins
Kwong was one of the first
people to examine Fedson's ideas. Since most people on statins are older
adults, and this is the group most frequently hospitalized for
complications from influenza, it would be easy to look back and
determine if statins were beneficial. In a study published in PLOS One,
he and his colleagues compared around 1 million older Canadians who had
been prescribed statins with an equal number of non-statin takers and
measured how frequently they were hospitalized for pneumonia or
influenza-related complications each flu season. The team found a small
but significant benefit to statin takers: they were slightly less likely
to be hospitalized for pneumonia, die from pneumonia, or die from any
cause.
On the surface, it seemed a
victory for statins. But Kwong still isn't so sure. "We don't know if
the people who took the statins were hospitalized less and died less
often because of the statin, or because they were healthier to begin
with," he points out.
Not long after, Ann Thomas, an epidemiologist with the Oregon Public Health Division, did a similar look-back at influenza-related hospitalization and statin use in 59 counties during the 2007-2008 flu season. Her results, published in The Journal of Infectious Diseases,
were remarkably similar to Kwong's. Older adults already taking statins
when they were hospitalized for influenza were significantly less
likely to die from influenza.
Initially, Thomas says she was
convinced by the data and thought statins seemed extremely promising.
Today, however, she's less convinced. "I think what we're seeing may be
the Healthy User Effect — that people who take statins are healthier
overall than those who don't," Thomas concludes.
"The potential payoff is huge."
Still, Fedson and some other
scientists remain hopeful that more rigorous studies will reveal
statins' helpful nature for influenza. "The idea is appealing," says
Lester Kobzik, a professor of pathology at the Harvard School of Public
Health. "The potential payoff is huge for pandemic scenarios, if it
works ... but it remains an idea that needs more proof before it's ready
for prime-time in the clinic." That proof, Kobzik says, would come in
the form of randomized clinical trials — the gold standard for rigorous
drug testing.
The problem, Fedson says, is
getting funding for such trials — especially if the WHO and CDC aren't
interested. And because many statins are now available in generic form —
that's part of their appeal — pharmaceutical companies have little
motivation to make an investment. "These drugs could save lives," Fedson
says. "And we're just not paying attention."
